VIDEO: How to Increase Conversions with UX Design

Designers have a tendency to leave performance up to the engineering team, but all the love and care designers give to typography, color, and layout means nothing if the shopper bounces before the page is finished loading.

When performance is every team’s responsibility from the beginning, both you and your customers win. Let’s talk about a few of the dozens of user experience (UX) best practices Mobify has identified that can make or break your mobile commerce conversion rate.

The Top 4 UX Best Practices for Conversions

1. Emphasize free shipping

61% of customers abandon checkout when they discover extra costs, and 24% abandon because they can’t see or calculate shipping costs up-front.

2. Make Guest Checkout the Default

A Baymard Institute study showed that 35% of shoppers abandoned their carts because the site forced them to create an account before purchasing. We often see retailers prioritizing account creation and sign-up over a quick and speedy checkout because they want to know who shoppers are. The problem is, it’s backfiring. You wouldn’t force someone to hand over all of their personal data at a cash register, so why would you do it online?

3. Make Forms as Short as Possible

Asking for only the most critical data will help keep your forms short and to the point. Every form field increases the level of friction in an experience and creates a potential drop-off point. Staples conducted a radical experiment (at the time) and took the approach of asking shoppers only for information needed to get the product to them. It worked.

4. Make the Product Offering Clear on the Homepage

Research shows that shoppers who aren’t clear on a brand’s product offering will scan the homepage from top-to-bottom before proceeding. If your site is full of promotional content or doesn’t clearly inform shoppers of the product categories, they will move on to another site. To help shoppers understand your product offering and quickly jump into categories, use an app-like pattern of large category list navigation. This type of navigation uses iconography or product imagery to reduce the cognitive load required to determine your product offering.